A record of the highs and lows of a man looking at life with people without a drink in his hand

Thursday, 8 January 2009

Tempus fugit

Good lord, Thursday already? I'd done a good job of writing daily until now, but as always seems to happen with these things, it's proved impossible to keep up the pace. Truth be told, anything in the last few days would have only been filler. I have been busy every evening and by the time I'm home I rarely have the energy to sit and muse.

By Saturday it will have been two weeks. As I said to a mate yesterday, I'd half-hoped I'd be leaping about with excess energy by now, but it seems that all alcohol does is cream off the top 10% so you still end up feeling pretty much the same. I was curious what effect it would have on my other little ailments, namely my chronic heartburn and strange little pain around my hip. So far as the heartburn goes, it has proved helpful in offering a little support to my belief that I'm not so much suffering from persistent heartburn, but rather a burned or damaged oesophagus which is irritated by occasional heartburn. It feels vaguely better but that may just be psychosomatic. As for the hip, well, that's just the same so it's probably unrelated to drinking completely.

My girlfriend wrote a note on the internet last night that causes me to ponder where to go from here. She was full of praise for how over "the last week and a bit" - what a coincidence! - something "has clicked". In these situations, I become WOPR and fly into the future to predict as many scenarios as possible. Invariably, pessimism wins and I then have to conjure ways of defeating what has not yet happened. The future with the highest likelihood seems to be one where she associates me not drinking at all with things being great. I do not want this association to form as I'm tired already of even thinking about the long, dull conversations about moderation, temperance, a little bit of everything, etc etc etc...

Undeniably, things have been mellow over the past fortnight. But then again, things are smooth 99% of the time anyway so it's not much of a change, really. All it's done is stop those times when I've had a drink (not anything excessive, just a normal few drinks) and it sets my mind free from the normal routine of how my head works, I lose myself and begin to think extrovertly rather than introvertly; a consequence of this is that I want to do and feel things I normally can't so I lose interest in the touchy-feely stuff and pay her less attention because I want to communicate with other people. I guess that's not just down to drink but also my attitude to a group situation, that I don't want someone next to me niggling away all the time while I've got the group to think about. She doesn't seem to think that way and in the past has probably blamed it on drink but perhaps Saturday night may have shown her that it is how I need to be in a group.

About Me

Brian Ferry stated that love is a drug. What he neglected to mention is that alcohol is also a drug and trying to sit the two down over dinner results in a scene from Reservoir Dogs in my head. This is my attempt to record what freeing myself from beer is like.